The December “Entail of the Month” presents the Chapel of Our Lady of Piedade, established in 1548 by Francisco de Castelo Branco, Lord of Vila Nova de Portimão and Lord Chamberlain to King João III, at Quinta da Póvoa. In July of that year, Francisco succumbed to an unknown illness and was confined to his quarters in a luxurious family palace in Lisbon. Feeling his time running out, he had his will drawn up and stipulated that a proportion should serve to buy a standard of interest, which would pay for a chaplain to say daily mass in perpetuity at the chapel of Our Lady of Piedade, for the soul of Francisco, his first wife and his wife at the time. The chapel was built at some distance from the palace, surrounded by trees, orchards and ponds, eliciting a bucolic atmosphere around this site for recollection and spiritual reflection. However, these modest surroundings did not prevent its interior from being worthily filled with the important pieces of sacred art, reflecting the social status of the chapel’s founder. This becomes even more significant when we realise that this was not the main chapel of the Lords of Vila Nova, who maintained their pantheon inside the church of S. Martinho, alongside their Lisbon palace. Over the following centuries, the hermitage of Our Lady of Piedade gradually became a place of popular worship. Several miracles were attributed to the patron saint of the small temple and the reason its interior would, at the beginning of the 18th century, be completely filled with the former vows left by the faithful in acknowledgement of their protector’s intervention.

To find out more details about this Entail, go to this page with all the Entail of the Month information. Here, you may also find out about the other entails made available in the meantime, at: https://www.vinculum.fcsh.unl.pt/entail-of-the-month

You can also contribute to this initiative by making suggestions for future entails of the month and any details you may be able to provide. To this end, please contact the project at: vinculum@fcsh.unl.pt.

The VINCULUM project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Maria de Lurdes Rosa, Professor of NOVA FCSH and researcher at the Institute of Medieval Studies, awarded the first ERC Consolidator Grant to a Portuguese researcher in the field of History.